


their whole entire lives

by b00mgh



Category: Miss Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Can't forget that one, F/F, Futaba Sarah Shelly is Soft, Futaba Sarah Shelly is an Ass, Hallucinations, Hatano Kimie is Absolutely Unshakeable, Post-Fall, Sherlock comes back, Sherlock | Futaba Sara Shelly Lives, Tachibana Wato Can Kick Ass, Tachibana Wato has PTSD, Tachibana Wato is Soft, and depression, like u just cannot phase this woman, theyre both soft you fools, we love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:00:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24047809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: wato has been seeing sherlock since the evening after she jumped, which causes a lot of problems really fast when sherlock wants to make a grand entrance coming back from the dead and everything-- whoops.Or,When Sherlock comes back, Wato nearly cracks in half. They both do.And now they've got some figuring out to do... like why isn't Wato getting any better?
Relationships: Sherlock | Futaba Sara Shelly/Tachibana Wato
Comments: 31
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

Wato really won’t look away from Sherlock’s desk, it’s like she sees the real thing sitting right there. Mrs. Hatano stifles her own tears– she’s been alive too many years to be crying about such temporary separations as death. Sherlock may even find an easier time in another life. This one certainly had not been kind to her. But that leaves Mrs. Hatano, that leaves Reimon and Shibata, that leaves her dear older brother, that leaves Wato. But Mrs. Hatano has things to do, friends to talk to, hobbies to keep up with. She has a life to carry on with.

So Mrs. Hatano leaves, and that leaves Wato. She stares at that chair for another hour before sighing, folding in on herself, whispering “I wish you were here.”

Wato eats when she’s hungry. That ends up being Tuesday-ish. She shakes on her way from the living room floor to the kitchen and she hates herself for it. It’s just breakfast. Sherlock hated breakfast. Sherlock never needed breakfast, just coffee. Sherlock fucking died for Wato, and Wato can’t even conduct herself with any sort of dignity while she’s walking from the living room floor to the kitchen for breakfast.

“You haven’t eaten in two days, at least,” Sherlock mutters, kinda laughing, from somewhere, “why didn’t you eat sooner?” 

“Shut up, Sherlock.”

Wato opens the pantry. It’s got a few options. The choice feels overwhelming, so Wato shuts the pantry. Her knees give, and she sits on the floor in front of the pantry feeling empty in mind and body. Just… there. Unfortunately. 

“People need food, Wato,” Sherlock tells her. Her voice is didactic and chiding. Wato would give a lot to hear it vibrate in her ears instead of stumbling along her neurons.

She scowls. “You didn’t.”

“Well,” Sherlock puffs, and Wato can see her flipping her hair dramatically out of the corner of her eye, “I was never really human, was I?”

“No,” Wato admits, “you weren’t.”

Sometime, somehow, Wato chews on some noodles without boiling them. She can’t find the energy to boil them. Who cares anyway? It’s not like the boiling does anything. Just makes them soft. After she’s eaten a few, though, her body processes the carbohydrates enough for her to sit up on her knees and peer once again into the pantry. Bread. Rice. Cup noodles. Some weird fruit bars, probably left from last time Sherlock went shopping. When was the last time Sherlock went shopping? Before she died, probably. How long ago was that? What day was it? Still Tuesday, late Tuesday. Fifteen days ago. Half a month.

Wato closes the pantry again. She munches on some more uncooked pasta. She’s pretty sure she remembers Sherlock sending her to get this pasta. She had been adamant. That felt like more than fifteen days ago. The last spot of color in her life, a little red spark of pasta noodle that doesn’t really taste good uncooked. She puts down the pasta noodle. 

“Wato, you’ve got to do  _ something _ ,” Sherlock whines, “I’m trapped in whatever limited imagination you can conjure– and I’m  _ bored _ .”

“Then disappear,” Wato mutters malignantly. “It’s not like I want to be haunted.”

Sherlock gasps in offense that’s almost real, “I am  _ not _ a ghost. I am a  _ hallucination. _ Very different.”

“What do you want me to do?” Wato cries, suddenly violently angry. Her fists want to go through a wall, but she’s stuck talking to a person she couldn’t touch if she tried. “You were the only thing I had– the only thing, Sherlock– and now you’re– and now…” Wato can’t find it in herself to say it out loud. 

“Exercise is good for working through emotions, why not take up martial arts again?”

“I never told Sherlock that.”

“But I’m not Sherlock, remember?”

At some time before Wednesday, Wato has cooked and consumed the cup noodle, and one of those fruit bars, so by Wednesday morning she’s ready to go out and find a gym. She works up a bit of a sweat kicking the shit out of a practice dummy, and it makes her feel alive enough, just for a moment, to stop by the store on the way home to get some food. Easy stuff. Stuff she doesn’t have to cook. Carrots. More bread. Fruit snacks.

Days pass like this. Wato wakes up at some random hour. She eats something, usually a piece of bread. She goes to the gym and works off more energy than she has to spend. She comes home and eats whatever she encounters first, sometimes she’ll order food. She showers. She goes to bed. She doesn’t have the energy for anything else.

“I’ll just be gone a week, Wato, just until next Sunday” Mrs. Hatano is assuring her, even as she is ushered out the door by insistent text notifications from her hired driver. “I’m just visiting some friends– they’re wonderful ladies, we’re going to a hot spring!” Wato barely moves to register the words, just nods complacently and continues staring at the chair Sherlock used to sit in when she worked at her computer. Mrs. Hatano frowns. “I’ve asked Detective Reimon and Shibata to check on you while I’m away, I gave them a copy of the house key.” She can’t do much else. Wato is a grown woman, Mrs. Hatano can’t force her to do anything, and grieving can take time. It’s been two months. The gym has given her something to fill her time, and Wato is definitely getting stronger, but Mrs. Hatano knows that is surface level. When she looks Wato in the eyes, nobody is home. But Mrs. Hatano’s friends planned this trip specifically for her: the hot spring is holding a grief counseling seminar and they all contributed to pay for it. She just wishes Wato could come. 

But she does have to leave, so she quietly shuts the door and drags her bags downstairs. Reimon and Shibata will be by to check on her tomorrow. Wato is a grown woman, she can go that long on her own.

“Wato, I’m bored.”

“Shut up, Sherlock.”

“I’m  _ bored _ .”

“Shut up, Sherlock.”

“Can’t you think me up another friend or something?”

Wato sighs heavily. She wants to vomit. She wants to scream. She wants to rip holes in pavement and tear Sherlock’s old clothes, untouched in her room, to shreds. Technically, nothing is stopping her from doing any of these things. But she’s exhausted. She doesn’t want to get up off of the living room floor, watching imaginary-Sherlock rock back and forth in the chair like a toddler and scowl at her. It’s almost as good as the real thing. Cocaine cut with sugar. Heroin mixed with lighter fluid. Wato doesn’t know how she knows what that’s like. 

“Just go for a walk– do it for me, Wato, I’m so bored.”

Wato peels herself off the floor and pushes herself to stand up. She doesn’t bother changing. It’s not like it matters what she wears anyway. Sherlock isn’t here to have her aesthetic sensibilities disturbed. Yesterday’s (the day before? Three days ago?) clothes will be fine. But she does grab that jacket– the green Hermes one that used to have a bloodstain before Wato decided the stain didn’t fit the coat and washed it out. Wato pretends it still smells like Sherlock so she doesn’t have to disturb her room to touch the clothes she actually used to use. She mulls over eating something, but deems the effort not worth it and goes outside. She walks to the church, gets a better idea and walks to the nearest convenience store to buy a rose, she walks to the roof and leaves it there, she walks to the bridge and stares at the water and considers jumping before deciding that if she was going to jump then she should have done that on the roof. 

It’s before she’s decided to walk home that the tell-tale click of fashionable heels signals Sherlock’s arrival.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heeyyyyy yall!!! hope you're ready for some watolock angst! bc i have enough to share!!! :DDDDD
> 
> wanna see what's up next/what else I'm doing? check me out on Tumblr! [ https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ]
> 
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!


	2. Chapter 2

“Wato,” Sherlock says, “let’s go home.”

Tears would have been an expected outcome. Screaming, perhaps. Anger, resentment, grief, relief, any of those things would have qualified as perfectly normal and healthy things to feel. That would all have been just fine. Sherlock knows she has been gone for one month, three weeks, and four days– and is returning the day after the acquisition of the final brainwashed member of the Stella Maris cult. They can’t act on orders to kill Sherlock if Sherlock is already dead. Really, she’d been holing up in a safe house that Kento had set up for her, and counting the days like an inmate. 

But now she gets to go home! She gets to see Wato and Mrs. Hatano again! (Reimon and Shibata had known she was alive, since they had to help her fake her death, but Wato and Mrs. Hatano had been totally unaware, and Sherlock was anxious to get back to them.)

So you’ll understand why Sherlock was a little surprised when Wato did not do any of those expected actions. When she just sighed and said “Alright then.”

They go home. Sherlock is a little bit peeved. She thought Wato would have, at least,  _ some _ reaction to her miraculous return from the dead. She did not think Wato would take it all in stride and go home and say “I don’t care anymore, I’m just gonna eat bread and die,” and then proceed to complete step one of that plan. 

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” Sherlock begs, her disappointment more evident than she’d like (but this  _ is _ Wato, and Sherlock has never been able to hide too much from Wato).

Wato shrugs, “As happy as I was yesterday.” Sherlock thinks that Wato has lost track of time, or that she is being especially ill-tempered because of Sherlock’s (fake) death. And Sherlock is not technically wrong, but that isn’t really right either. 

This continues for three days. 

Reimon and Shibata don’t come to check on Wato because they know that Sherlock is there– and that probably means everything is fine. In a few days, when everything has calmed down, they figure, they’ll drop by for a friendly visit. Shibata, once in a while over the course of those three days, receives a text about how bored Sherlock is, and how rude Wato is being.

In the house, Sherlock mills about, observing and losing track of time on the internet. She notices on the second day that Wato still hasn’t eaten anything but that first slice of bread, so she orders some food. When it arrives, Wato frowns at the delivery girl before muttering about how she must have forgotten that she had ordered it. Rude, Sherlock thinks. When Sherlock talks, Wato doesn’t light up like she used to. Instead, she just tunes her out, or occasionally scoffs at her. Wato doesn’t ask any questions or marvel at deductions– when Sherlock guesses the plot to a movie she’s never seen on TV, Wato doesn’t ask her how she could know that, or demand a replay of Sherlock’s thoughts like normal, she just rolls her eyes and says “Yeah, I know, I’ve seen it before.” Wato doesn’t eat, she goes to the gym once, her sleep is punctuated by harsh cries and frequent waking spells, and mostly she just sits on the floor and watches Sherlock at her computer. 

On the third day, it becomes eerie. Sherlock has ordered food twice, and Wato has mistaken the order for her own both times. When Sherlock moves things, Wato wonders how it got there. If Sherlock speaks, it goes unheard or uncared for. This isn’t Wato– or, more accurately, it isn’t Sherlock. 

On the fourth day, two days before Mrs. Hatano is due back from her hot springs trip, Sherlock sits down on the couch, picks up the remote, and turns the TV on. 

Eventually, Wato turns to look at the technicolor screen, frowning and trying to make out the images, upside down, from where she lays on the floor. 

“You’ve got to leave the house sometime, Wato,” Sherlock sighs.

Wato grumbles, “Back to that again?”

That. That’s the proof Sherlock needed. Because she knows she hasn’t spoken a word of leaving the house in the past three days. Something isn’t right here, and Sherlock is starting to put together what that something is.

“What do you mean?” Sherlock presses, trying for what information she can get before Wato lapses into more morose silence.

With a put-upon sigh, Wato glares and growls, “I don’t need to explain anything to  _ you _ .”

“Why not?”

“You’re just a figment of my imagination, Sherlock. In reality, you’re dead, and you’re not–” Wato has to swallow, thick and tearful, before finishing, “you’re not coming back.” She still ends up crying. 

And Sherlock  _ gapes _ . Wato has turned away from her, shoulders trembling in quiet sobs, but Sherlock is staring at her scarred shoulders, hidden beneath layers of sweater, mouth literally hanging a little open, before she snaps it shut with a click of her teeth. Wato thinks she is a hallucination. More than that, she’s been hallucinating Sherlock for some time before the real Sherlock had risen from her (fake) death. 

Even Sherlock, witty as she is, has absolutely no clue what to say to that. 

Wato can hear the hallucination pacing. Fast, frantic steps that stagger once in a while, like it keeps tripping in the same spot. Wato rolls over, not bothering to scrub her eyes dry because she knows that it won’t do much other than irritate her already red-raw lids, and sees the hallucination  _ is _ pacing and  _ is _ tripping over a ruffle in the area rug that Wato hasn’t bothered to smooth out. 

“But I’m  _ real _ ,” the hallucination points out, very committedly. It’s been on this kick, trying to convince Wato of its consciousness outside herself, for a good ten minutes now. “I’m  _ real _ , Wato, look at me!” And Wato does look, if only to silence her brain, but she just sees Sherlock, a convincing projection of her anyway, wearing whatever the sauces in her gray matter have conceived to dress her in today with a sour expression. It looks a little desperate. 

Wato shrugs, unimpressed.

Skidding a little on the wooden part of the floor where Wato still hasn’t bothered to rise for the day, the hallucination looks at Wato right in the eyes. “Wato. What can I do to convince you I’m real?” 

Wato thinks hard. She still hasn’t eaten in a while– yesterday, maybe? The day before? Time is a difficult concept to grasp– and that muddies her muddling mind. What task is impossible for a well-voiced projection of her grief and guilt? 

Nothing comes to mind. Wato shrugs. 

And the projection whines, a low, off-kilter sound that scares Wato enough to make her flinch. She’s never heard Sherlock make that sound. Whatever neurochemicals are messing with her tympanic membranes today have really outdone themselves. Wato starts crying again: silent, empty little drops that are replaced the moment they fall. She doesn’t want to know what Sherlock sounds like so distraught, doesn’t even want her brain to unconsciously imagine it in a fucked up way of doing penance for killing her closest friend. That’s not a noise she ever wants to hear echoed in Sherlock’s vocal cords. Her silent tears grow to hiccuping sobs before she can stop them. The projection is crying too– and Sherlock never cried, so Wato knows it’s a fake. 

There they are, Wato and her hallucination, crying together on the floor because Wato can’t bring herself to remember to eat regularly now that the only light in her life jumped off a roof so Wato wouldn’t have to shoot her and go to prison. 

“Maybe I should jump off a roof.”

And the hallucination’s sobs grow louder and louder and eventually Wato realizes she can make words out of the sounds. 

“Please, please, no, Wato don’t, what can I do, how can I stop you, please, Wato, stay with me, no, no no no–” and it makes its way closer, closer, scooting on its knees until it’s inches from where Wato lays and it grabs her by the shoulders until she’s upright and it holds her close enough that Wato can feel every heartbeat behind the ribs–  _ heartbeat _ – and shuddering intake of breath in the heave of the shoulders–  _ crying _ – and harsh escape of breath from the lips onto her shoulder–  _ breathing _ – and– oh gods.

Something a figment of her imagination could never do.

It could never touch her.

But Sherlock could. Can. Is. 

Something that isn’t quite horror, but feels very close, curls long, spindly tendrils into Wato’s veins. “Sherlock?”

She gets a vague sound of recognition, but it’s not what she needs.

“Sherlock,” Wato repeats, air catching in her throat, “You’re really Sherlock? Right here, you’re not– you– you’re  _ here _ ?” 

Sherlock tries to pull away from Wato to look her square in the eyes again, but with the sudden cascade of realization that Sherlock is alive, Sherlock is here, Sherlock is not dead, Wato’s arms wrap tight around Sherlock, fingers seizing the stiff, expensive fabric of her dress shirt. Now that Wato is this close, pressed together at every seam, she can smell Sherlock so vividly that there’s almost no mistaking it– pen ink and dust and essential oils. But after two months, she can’t be sure. So she doesn’t let go. If she did, Sherlock might leave– do something stupid like throw herself off a building. 

“Sherlock?” Wato demands, panicky and strung-out.

“Yes?” Sherlock replies, sharp and emotional.

“Sherlock,” Wato whimpers, “Tell me something– something I don’t know,” she can’t find the spot in her trachea where the air is supposed to hit, and it’s scaring her, “please. Please, I need to know it’s you.” 

Sherlock’s palms press into Wato’s back, one where her shoulders meet her neck and the other at the base of her spine. An intentionally slow breath puffs from her nose, and Wato feels her body begin to sync their breathing. She realizes Sherlock knows this, and is trying to calm her down. Wato wants to curl into a ball and let this hyperreal dream last, ensconcing her. She can’t breathe again. With her hands a stable draw to physicality, Sherlock hums quietly. “Shibata had a little crush on Detective Reimon when he first joined the police. It took him six months to get over it.”

An erratic snort of laughter tumbles clumsily from Wato’s lips into Sherlock’s clavicle. “He did not,” she insists.

“You were the one who said to tell you something you didn’t know,” Sherlock half-laughs. 

After that, they force life into normalcy by not talking about The Fall. They can’t. If either of them tries, they both collapse. The Fall is just off-limits. That’s alright though. They’ll pretend it’s fine.

Mrs. Hatano takes Sherlock’s return fairly well, and with a grain of salt that makes the old woman frown at Sherlock when she’s not looking for several days before it loses its fire and dies out. Reimon and Shibata start asking for Sherlock on cases again. It’s normal. It’s fine.

It’s not fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all im just having a great time with this angst :D  
> (also can i just say as a student in finals week trying to negotiate where to transfer to this fall, i am so glad i have this fic prewritten and ready to go like it's just a relief to have something already ready to go rn thank u to past me XD)
> 
> also, for those that don't know, i am writing this from my bathtub while i sit with the kittens I am fostering!! I love these guys to DEATH already and its been 5 days. 
> 
> want to know more about what I'm writing, what I will be writing, or my kitten foster babies? check me out on Tumblr! [ tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ] 
> 
> as always,   
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!! :DDDD


	3. Chapter 3

Wato has been getting worse. If Sherlock is willing to admit it to herself, she’s been getting worse for a while. While Sherlock has been mellowing out with Wato’s calm energy, has been letting loose with her nearby as a check, has been looking less at drugs and more at cases because if she’s on a case then she has Wato right there with that doe-eyed look that Sherlock just adores, Wato has been walking slower, smiling less, looking over her shoulder more like she expects something to be there. Sherlock’s noticed it out of the corner of her eye, but she’s never sat down long enough to think about it, to piece it together, to assign it a label and a significance and a solution. 

The first time she thinks about it is when Wato is strapped to a chair getting her brains fried– crying without crying out because the pain is bad enough that there just isn’t a sound to be made– and Sherlock is full-on panicking. She knew she just had to stall this crazy bitch long enough for the police to arrive, but she was running out of options and ideas and Wato was essentially dying in front of her. The thought comes like a crashing train, like the way your life flashes before your eyes in your final moments, and she remembers Wato asking her why she was called Sherlock, with an expression that said she knew why, and Sherlock could see in the way her shoulders had dropped in that moment that there was a kinship between souls who had come right up to the edge of losing everything, and so she had dragged Wato by the arm and given her a bed and a friend because that’s what Sherlock had needed in those dark moments where pins and needles and tablets and pills seemed wonderful ideas. 

The second time she thinks about it is when Wato comes back from the store three hours late, two hours after her older brother had gone home. Her eyes had just a residual of the redness of tears, but the slope of her shoulders is a tell-all. One droops with the exhaustion of whatever had left her crying, the other is held stiff straight like it needs to be that way. Wato had smiled softly, and it’s after that when Sherlock realizes she’s been standing in the doorway waiting this whole time, tapping her foot anxiously– remembering acutely that last time Wato wandered off and came back late it was because she had been strapped to a chair getting her brains fried while Sherlock was full-on panicking. Wato says she has the tea– and she got the kind Sherlock had asked for, not her brother’s– and she says she wishes they’d left her some of the chocolates, and she says she’s going to go lie down for a bit. Sherlock doesn’t stop her, but she does follow her to her bedroom door and stay there until Wato asks her what she’s doing. Then Sherlock says she has to (quick, think of something normal) do an experiment on those decaying leaves she’s been saving in the freezer, and Wato laughs a little at that, but it sounds hollow and afraid and she shuts the door very quickly and Sherlock hears her crying at various points for the rest of the evening and night and morning. 

By the third time, Sherlock is starting to pick up on things: Wato always holds her shoulders like that, one sloped and one rigid, when she’s upset or very tired; and also she never wears any sleeves shorter than her elbow; and also she’s very particular about changing in front of people; and also her arm gets sore when it rains, and she can never lift it very high. So, it made perfect sense to get started on that cucumber toner that Hatano’s friend had been bugging her about for months. Was she going to tell the old bat who asked for it that she altered the formula a bit this time to include some pain relief? Absolutely not, she probably wouldn’t even notice. And Sherlock was sure nobody would notice if she put the “extra” toner in a pretty bottle with instructions written in permanent marker on the side. It might have been the first thing Sherlock had done for somebody else in at least a year– and Sherlock felt inclined to do it again, if it got her another of the shy, honest smiles that Wato flashed at her from across the room the next time she saw her. The feeling that lit up her chest and sent her swaying into another room was as addictive as any drug, with a much better high. 

Then The Fall. But they can’t talk about that.

And the crash is worse when she starts hearing high-pitched whines coming from Wato’s room at night (what can Sherlock say? She’s a light sleeper), and there’s nothing but tear-stained pillowcases and sweaty sheets when she goes to investigate. Sherlock almost wishes it had been a criminal, because she can bash a criminal’s head in with a lamp; she can’t bash Wato’s head in with a lamp, that wouldn’t solve anything. So she sits on the edge of the bed and counts how many breaths between each whimper, the change in decibel of every noise, the correlation of the time between movement and how far the movement reaches, how far she curls in on herself, how many times Sherlock has to run her fingers through Wato’s hair before either of them can rest easy again. It’s miserable. Sherlock leaves before dawn to do something about breakfast– she’s always hungry if she stays up all night. That morning is the first one where Wato starts having phantom leg pains. 

The leg pains get worse, and Wato starts to find it hard to tag along with Sherlock. Even though she’d never admit it aloud, Wato starts staying home because it hurts so bad when she walks, and somehow Shibata is the first one to say anything about it. He tells Sherlock that she had better take care of the only friend she’s got, and there goes the first time Sherlock doesn’t deny that they’re friends because she misses that part in favor of weighing how obvious it would be if she started trying to use subliminal messaging to snap Wato out of her psychosomatic limp (totally not realizing that Shibata now knew they were friends, and once someone as dumb as Shibata knew, that meant it was plain as day to anyone else). Around this time is when Sherlock starts working in earnest to help Wato, but nothing she tries makes more than a dent in those false smiles and wet eyes.

Apparently, all it takes for Wato to stop limping is the panic of a text message containing nothing but the first image of Sherlock she’s seen in two days and an address– after that, she sprints, too distraught to remember the painful injury that never existed. When she gets there, she doesn’t waste time negotiating with the kidnapper or her four guards interspersed throughout the building, her high school martial arts training, as well as the training she’d done while Sherlock was dead, kicks in and she just beats the everloving shit out of the kidnapper, and then she steals her gun and delivers non-fatal bullet wounds to the guards. By the time she gets to Sherlock– who had been tied up and knocked around just a bit, but otherwise left as bait– she’s just covered in blood from administering basic first aid to the people she very recently debilitated, and Sherlock can’t help but think that this is a good look on her too: battle-worn, bloody, eyes that speak of doing this again and before. Both shoulders feel solid enough as Wato supports Sherlock’s weight on the way out, but Sherlock still feels the outline of a scar she had known was there. After that night, Wato doesn’t leave her alone for a week, and Sherlock can’t say she minds all too much. She thinks that they’ve gotten over the worst of it, and that that’s all very well and good because she’s hoping this whole kidnapping debacle had at least some benefits– she’d do it another ten times if it meant Wato would stop staring helplessly into space like that.

But, of course, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse. The limp subsides when Sherlock manages to distract Wato with something exciting– double-homicide with an invisible weapon, locked-room mystery, deceased murder suspect– but these distractions have unexpected side-effects. Like that one time at the aforementioned double-homicide when a child walked by, probably on their way home from school, and Wato saw them and immediately sat down on the ground and curled in on herself, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to be coaxed out of her shell for several minutes; they had been lucky that time in that they had been the first to arrive on the scene, and Wato had managed to snap herself out of it by the time Reimon and Shibata arrived with their loud and flashy sirens.; as soon as the two men approached her, Sherlock snapped at them that she already had everything they needed, and she dragged Wato home by the arm so that she’d have an excuse to hold her hand. Or like that other time in that locked room mystery where the deceased swung by a rope from the ceiling and Wato had just stared in slack-jawed horror with eyes more terrified than Sherlock had yet seen them, and Sherlock made a scene so that no one would notice it. Or the other time when Sherlock told Wato that their primary murder suspect, and the only one, had been deceased since three hours before the time of the murder, and that they had just found her body, and Wato said with a haunted expression that she didn’t think it was safe to go outside, and there had been lots of pleading and reasoning from Wato and Sherlock (respectively) until something snapped into place in Wato’s eyes and she shook her head and followed Sherlock out with a smile. 

Wato has been getting worse.

If Wato wanted to talk about it Sherlock would be all ears– if only to stop the dark circles under Wato’s eyes from getting any darker, or to dispel some of the red rimming her lids– but Wato doesn’t know how to talk. If Sherlock had asked, Wato would have likely started to open up, but Sherlock doesn’t know how to ask– she’s never had anyone she’s been close enough with to care about talking to them. So, here we are: left with the hard way.

This time, it is Sherlock who has been stabbed in the thigh, and then again in the shoulder, and then again in the abdomen, and then again in the hand. Asshole. The real kicker is they didn’t even catch the guy, and he had been the prime suspect, which is what has Sherlock really squirming. Actually, to herself and tacitly, Sherlock is really grateful she is the one who got stabbed; she doesn’t know what to do with stab wounds, and she’s certain that she would have flipped her own lid if it had been Wato bleeding out onto the pavement in a back alleyway. Unfortunately, Wato is not exactly present, she’s a few streets over, taking the route Sherlock told her to take in order to cut the crook off at both ends. Sherlock is begging any higher power– God, Buddha, her brother– that Wato does not encounter that man, because he is big and he has a knife and she is small and will probably still try and stop him because Sherlock asked her to. 

Off.

On. 

“Sherlock, get ahold of yourself!” Wato is screaming in her ear. She’s not crying, doesn’t seem to have room within her being for anything except panic. “Come on, come on,” she pleads. “I don’t have time for this!” To Sherlock, this is funny enough to laugh at— what could possibly have her running out of time?

But then Sherlock remembers she has been stabbed, and she feels the blood pooling in all the wrong places, and feels the pain electrify her nerves, and realizes that maybe Wato doesn’t have time because Sherlock is bleeding out. She hears bits of things when her ears are willing to put in the monumental effort to hear.  _ Behind the– yes– shoulder, leg, lower abdomen– Sherlock, your hand– alright, you’re alright– on their way.  _ Between the pain that renders her wonderful faculties inert and the piercing, shrill tone of the sirens getting louder with proximity, Sherlock is, for all intents and purposes, totally offline. She couldn’t tell you where she is, how she got there. She knows Wato is pressing down in all sorts of places, and she can feel a different kind of pressure– perhaps fabric?– in the places where her hands aren’t. Her hands are cold. Soft. Sherlock hesitates to say weak, but she knows well that Wato is capable of more physical strength than this. 

She processes none of this in an intellectual sense. Just the visceral sensations that brush against the rocky cliff edge of her baseline knowledge, and the pieces don’t match up. That small, vague, foreboding sense coming from where Wato’s cold hands are drowned in her warm blood gives Sherlock a moment’s pause in the cacophony of siren screams and screaming pain and painful fear to open her eyes.

She closes them immediately. 

Off.

On. 

Someone is taking Wato’s hands away. The new hands are warm. Sherlock is shaking from the cold. She wants Wato’s hands back. Wato is crying, somewhere. Sherlock can’t open her eyes. Her ears ring from the noise. She can smell the color of her blood and it’s everywhere. She’s in a void of space and time and every second seems to go on forever. Where’s Wato?

Off.

On.

_ “Missed organs” _

_ “Anterior tibial artery” _

_ “Clean break in the 5th metacarpal” _

_ “Could have been worse.” _

_ “Moderate concussion” _

_ “Cranial swelling” _

_ “Cracked rib 6, bruised 5 and 7” _

_ “Surgery in her chest was successful” _

_ “Scarring” _

_ “More sedatives” _

Off. 

On.

“How bad is it, Anii?” Sherlock asks. She still hasn’t opened her eyes. That would take too much energy, and the lights in the inhospitable hospital room will be much too bright, she’s sure.

“Sherlock.” Her brother sounds surprised, and that gives her enough cause to smirk. “How did you know it was me?”

“I can smell your cologne from here.”

Futaba Kento is silent for just long enough that Sherlock can imagine he is trying to ascertain whether or not he put on too much cologne, but he ultimately decides it’s a trivial matter. Sherlock still snickers at him. It’s her inherent right to do so, as a younger sister. 

“How bad is it?” she asks again. 

“Bad enough,” Kento sighs, “they’ve got you on enough morphine that you’re loopier than normal. Wato should wake up soon.”

“No, no, let her sleep,” Sherlock insists, “I think I remember her saving my life? I bet she thinks she’s cute. She’s right though.”

Kento has no clue what to make of this string of nonsense, so he lets it ride. He thinks it’s best not to argue with the hospitalized. “Why don’t you sleep some more?”

Sherlock still doesn’t open her eyes, but she nods perfunctorily. “I’m still tired. Probably because I got stabbed. Blood loss does that…”

Off.

On.

“Hmm, so even Shibata came to visit me?” Sherlock mumbles as her mind stumbles into consciousness once again. 

She hears his characteristic scoff, and then the uncharacteristic “Well, we  _ are  _ friends.”

“That’s a stretch,” Sherlock tells him. They both chuckle. Sherlock still feels the incredible high of the morphine, so the back of her mind processes that she must still be incredibly injured. She wonders how long she’s been in this bed.

“How come Wato’s never here when I wake up?” she complains.

“Whaddaya mean?” Sherlock hears Shibata’s head snap up, and that’s when she knows she’s missing something. 

Her eyes peel themselves open, excruciatingly. The morphine is doing a fantastic job, but her body screams when she tries to move certain parts. Her left leg, her left shoulder, her right hand, any part of her core. Still, she turns her head to look at Shibata. He’s got dark circles around his eyes, crumbs on his wrinkled shirt, and an empty chair to one side. He was with Reimon since about three hours before, they had some food, and then Reimon had to leave in a hurry (probably for work), Shibata is trying to catch up on sleep. Sherlock still can’t tell what time it is because the curtains are blackouts and shut tightly against the outside. Nothing she can discern from him about Wato, and he’s the only real clue in the room. Sherlock’s medical chart is facing away from her, clipped to the foot of the bed. The only other furniture besides the bed and the chairs is a small nightstand, on which there is nothing. In fact, the only thing she can see about Wato is absolutely nothing, meaning Wato has not yet set foot in this room. 

“Sherlock?” Shibata’s voice sounds very far away. She’s tired again. Thinking has exhausted her enough that she just wants to float back down into the quiet of the drugs they are pumping her full of. “Wato hasn’t woken up yet.” And there’s that again. Anii said it too. Why does Wato seem to have the strangest sleep schedule lately? Has Sherlock only woken up in the middle of the night, just coincidentally? Wato hasn’t been sleeping through the night herself, so Sherlock can only assume she’s started taking melatonin, or something else to help her sleep. Of course, melatonin is known for giving people nightmares, so that wouldn’t be a great choice, but– 

Wait. Wrong angle. She’s missed something in the tone of voice. If Wato were here, she wouldn’t have missed it, but Wato isn’t here and Sherlock is so fucked up on drugs that she is missing things and she can’t think straight and she can’t remember more than a few minutes back and her mind is running off on tangents and Sherlock is missing things. 

What does she remember? Starting from the beginning.

Serial stabber, four confirmed kills and three other suspected with circumstantial evidence. Chase, Sherlock one way and Wato another.  _ Hope she doesn’t run into him everything hurts sirens are too loud cold hands warm blood could have been worse wato should wake up soon wato hasnt woken up yet _ Oh no. 

“Shibata,” Sherlock growls. She doesn’t mean to growl, but she’d do it again if she had to. “Where’s Wato?” His expression details a conviction not to tell her. “Tell me,” she demands. He remains stoic. 

A wave of white-hot pain echoes through every nerve ending available to her faculties as she rips the IV out of her arm– sweet, sweet drugs be damned– and begins to climb out of the hospital bed, the arm she can physically use to support her weight shaking, her legs altogether fawnish, her retinas painting the room with flashing stars to highlight her efforts. She isn’t hard to subdue, doused in drugs and stabbed to slices, but she still swings her arms in an effort to get Shibata to back the hell off and let her go find out for herself where Wato is because it is  _ suffocating her _ not knowing. She left Wato once and she  _ will not do it again _ .

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” Shibata finally yields, “just calm down!” Sherlock stops flailing. “You’ll rupture your stitches.” She settles back into the bed, and Shibata takes his time recovering her with the stiff blankets that smell like bleach. Sherlock can still remember what bleach tastes like. 

“Where’s Wato?” Sherlock repeats.

“You don’t remember anything?”

Shibata remembers. He remembers because it was his phone,  _ his personal cell _ , that got the call. Wato had been too out of it to remember which number to call, so it was his or Reimon’s personal cell number at the top of her contacts list because she only has four contacts total, and one of them is Sherlock, so it was a matter of which of their numbers her bloody fingers found first and it had been his so Shibata heard with graphic, tinny, poor-cell-service detail through speakerphone as Sherlock grunted and cried out in pain when Wato tied one half of her jacket around her middle and one around her hand and pressed her palm into her shoulder and shoved her finger in between the severed pieces of her artery in her leg and Wato sobbed and cried out to Sherlock, inches away, and told her she was going to be just fine, Wato wasn’t going to leave her for anything, and Shibata had been screaming through the receiver trying to get a position, a status, anything. He remembers how long it took them to find out the location, he remembers speeding to the alley and still hearing Wato’s voice, weaker and weaker, telling Sherlock to breathe,  _ breathe, _ even though Sherlock stopped responding long ago. He remembers thinking he must have been too late when he and Reimon and an ambulance and another squad car arrived on scene to find Wato, covered in too much blood to differentiate her own wounds, swaying where she sat trying to keep pressure on Sherlock’s everything and Sherlock pale as a ghost on the gritty asphalt. He remembers the paramedics prying Wato’s fingers off of Sherlock, and Sherlock was too unconscious and Wato was too dazed for either of them to care, and Wato passed out the moment Sherlock was in the back of the first ambulance, and the paramedics didn’t realize for several seconds, but Shibata did, and his stomach dropped because  _ Wato can’t die, Sherlock can’t die, his friends cannot die. _

“I remember the stabber got away,” Sherlock admits, very petulantly, oblivious to Shibata’s very real fears, “but everything after that is hazy.”

“Wato is, um,” Shibata hesitates. Everyone, Reimon, Futaba Kento, they told him not to tell Sherlock. They said she would recover best if she thought Wato was fine, and Shibata is inclined to agree. But the alternative is Sherlock attempting to sprint all over the place with a hole in her leg, so. “Wato’s down the hall. She has to stay sedated until the swelling in her brain goes down. The doctors have said she should wake up today or tomorrow.”

“How long was I asleep?” Sherlock presses. She’s staying remarkably calm, but Shibata can tell there’s a tightly-wound spring ready to punch him in the face if he keeps twisting up the music box. 

“Six days.”

“What else?”

“Eh?”

“What. Else.” Sherlock repeats, hissing the words out, shredding them between clenched teeth. “Other than the  _ cranial swelling _ .”

Shibata is looking entirely uncomfortable now. He wasn’t supposed to bring up Wato at all, but he figured Sherlock remembered Wato being pulled aside and asked what the extent of her own injuries were, and Wato just repeating  _ she’ll be okay she’s alright she’s alright _ to a concerned paramedic, remembered Wato collapsing the moment she was left unattended. He certainly can’t get that out of his head, the fear of it all. Now he’s in too deep to struggle out. “She cracked a rib, bruised some others. She was stabbed in the chest, and they had to do surgery to stitch her right atrium back together. It all went pretty well, considering. She hadn’t lost nearly as much blood as you had by the time we got to the scene.”

“Get out,” Sherlock snaps. 

“What?”

“ _ Get out _ , _ Shibata. _ ”

Shibata flusters immediately. “There’s no way I’m leaving you to run off on your own– you still need your IV back in–”

“Then call the nurse and then  _ leave _ ,” Sherlock hisses, “I need to be alone.”

Shibata is out of his depth. He’s got no clue where to go. Reimon would know, but he’s out interrogating the stabber again (they’ve gotten nothing out of the man in six days). He leaves to get a nurse, who he follows to the room to make sure Sherlock didn’t go anywhere before going home. He’ll apologize later, he supposes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today i offer my readers more angst  
> next week? who knows....
> 
> i hope you're enjoying!! :DDDDDDDD   
> tomorrow is my last finals, and after that I'm freeeeeeee to write as much as i want!!!!! (i kinda need an income tho >~<")
> 
> check me out on Tumblr for what's up next, and some stuff about kittens! [ tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ]
> 
> as always, lyasm and  
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!! <33333333


	4. Chapter 4

Off.

On.

They’ve lessened the morphine enough that Sherlock can dance a careful, sharp edge of pain and consciousness. They’re trying to wean her off of it. Sherlock knows all about that. She knows they’d lock her in a room and do it cold turkey if she didn’t have a leg recovering from hemorrhage and a broken bone in her hand and two other stab wounds and not enough blood to go around. She considers herself blessed. She deserves cold turkey with untreated wounds, but this will suffice. 

She’s asked six times to see Wato. It’s been less than twenty-four hours since Shibata cracked under pressure. She should apologize, but she doesn’t want to yet. She wants to wallow in self-loathing and hatred. She’d like to drown in it, but Wato’s prognosis is good. So staying on-edge with morphine and bugging the nurses about when she can get out of this fucking bed will have to do. 

She remembers little of what happened, mostly the pain and the sirens and the sensation of cold hands pressing too hard, but the expression Shibata showed her intimated that he knew the whole plotline from start to finish in gory detail. She does not really want to remember, but she feels like she should. She just wants Wato to be alright and happy– not half-dead and depressed before the fact. 

Reimon visits her next, and it seems like an accident that has him and Anii running into each other. “Futaba Kento. Thank you for taking care of my sister.” “Reimon Gentarou. I’m sorry we didn’t arrive sooner.” They talked mostly to each other when she made it clear that she would only suffer conversation to the end of being permitted to stand up. 

Anii had pulled a very cruel trick when she had asked the fourth time if she could  _ at least _ get out of the bed. “Wato worked very hard to keep the artery in your leg as intact as possible, you wouldn’t want to jeopardize her work, would you?”

Reimon, the traitor, added, “She would be very upset if she heard you were harassing her fellow healthcare workers.” 

Sherlock had snapped “I don’t  _ care _ about how hard she worked to save my damn arteries, I want to get out of bed. Besides, she isn’t working as a doctor right now anyway.” And, to emphasize how entirely and completely she didn’t care, she huffed and turned on her side and went to sleep. 

Almost.

She eavesdrops for a while because the pain it took to turn on her side (the good side) is both sharp and itchy, the morphine doing little in the face of her aggravations, and she can’t get comfortable enough to sleep.

“I’ve got another 20 minutes.”

“You can go if you’d like, I can watch Sherlock.” 

“No, I want to be here.”

“Alright”

“Thank you for your care, Detective. I know my sister can be difficult, but she means well. She really does.”

“I know. She’s a good kid.”

Sherlock wants to bite back that if she were such a “good kid” then she wouldn’t be in a hospital bed after recklessly chasing down a stabbing victim, and Wato wouldn’t be in another room somewhere in the hall. 

Off.

On.

_ Finally _ , she is deemed well enough to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. Sherlock does the head nurse the courtesy of assuming she doesn’t understand how well this permission lines up with Wato’s recent awakening (she can read that in the way the woman stands, the clean lines of her clothes, the tired deepness of her crows' feet).

However, she needs someone to wheel her around. Mrs. Hatano visited yesterday, so it wouldn’t be her, and anyone else visiting would likely be doing it after they got off of work. 

Sherlock realizes she has no clue what day of the week it is. It was never something she paid attention to. That was one of Wato’s things. It had never mattered to Sherlock what day of the week it was. But if she needed to wait for someone to be off work, that sort of information should have been something she was paying attention to. In her plain little room, the only entertainment being the textbooks Mrs. Hatano ( _ bless _ her soul) dropped off when she visited, she has no way to mark the passage of time. How long has she been in this room? What day of the week is it? 

Before she knows it, her mild existential panic is interrupted by Shibata, who gives her an awkward look and drags a wheelchair into the room behind him.

“Come on, let’s go visit Wato,” he mutters, looking like he already regrets his decision. Sherlock has to remind herself, very forcefully, to step lightly on her injured leg as she descends from the bed and into the chair. Shibata’s awkward look turns into an awkward laugh. “You two are just crazy, you know,” he tells her. 

“You already visited her,” Sherlock states. The look in his eyes. The wheelchair. The wrinkle in the front of his shirt– his plainclothes shirt, this is his day off, it’s Saturday– from where he sat down for at least a few minutes.

“She’s about as drugged up as you were,” Shibata explains, “she’s not making a lot of sense yet. She can’t move much either: the doctors don’t want her moving her chest at all.” 

“Hmmm.”

“I’m saying none of your antics, Sherlock. She was really hurt too, and she’s probably not in her right mind enough yet to know her own limits.” Shibata sighs, and stops wheeling her. “Sherlock, are you even listening?”

“Of course I am,” Sherlock grunts, smashing the home screen button on her phone to close the tabs of medical notes on home care for patients after heart surgeries. “I’ll be very…” she struggles to find the right word. It’s not her typical vocabulary. “Gentle,” she decides. 

Shibata does not sound convinced, if his muttering is any indicator, but he wheels her into a room in which Wato lays, patiently dazed, staring at the heart monitor that Sherlock had been allowed to disconnect from days ago. She’s hooked up to an IV like Sherlock had been until she was permitted to eat normal food and take her pain relievers orally, the day before yesterday. Something about her face glitches in Sherlock’s mind. Like it’s not right. She keeps thinking there’s something on her face, but she can’t remember what it was. 

Wato turns her head, painstakingly, slowly, with effort, to look at Sherlock and Shibata. 

Oh. Right. Blood. 

To say it all rushed back would be a drastic overstatement, but Sherlock feels the expression might be appropriate for the way the chemicals within her body react to the memory of Wato’s face– adorned with bruises and blood of indeterminate origin, with scrapes and dirt and tears and chilling fear. She nearly convulses with the weight of her flinch, and any smile Wato may have been predisposed to is stolen by it. 

Sherlock is still forgetting to count how many days they were in the hospital by the time they’re leaving it. The nurses are under the impression that they will be under the supervision of a roommate, and did not quite put together that they live in the same apartment and  _ are _ the roommate the other has been talking about. Wato has been instructed to stay far away from strenuous activities of any kind, and not to even get up too fast. Her stitches will dissolve with time, and everything else is internal, so that’s alright. Sherlock has a cast on her hand and is swaddled in cloth like a newborn mummy from her shoulder to her navel. She is told her leg should be alright to walk on, but  _ no _ running, and once again no strenuous activity of any kind. Most of her problems are external, but they’re all less life-threatening, so that’s alright too. 

They go home, Mrs. Hatano lets them in with teary eyes and lots of well-wishing and even some tea she’s brewed, and lunch “to keep your strength up,” and they sit down in their chairs in the living room and they eat in silence. 

Nothing has changed. 

They’ve nearly died, again, and nothing has changed. Sherlock knows a few things, and one of those things is that after a near-death experience, something is supposed to  _ change _ . It should not be the same stifled, forced monotony of the past weeks. Wato should feel like she has to let something out, she should be  _ reacting _ . Even the hyperbolic reaction equivalent to the flinch a small child gets when her brother throws a pillow at her face. Something. Please, Wato, don’t just sit there and eat in silence like it’s any other day– how many times does one have to be hit with the pillow before the flinch is trained out?

Oh.

And several things, errant thoughts that Sherlock hasn’t yet archived to the unorganized recesses of her mind, stray observations, offhand comments that never fit in the conversation, they all add up. Not entirely, there are still missing variables in the equation, still particular brush strokes to be painted, still missing lines of data, but at least now she has the equation, the pencil sketch, the source code. 

They’ve got to talk about  _ it _ . And Sherlock had hoped they would not have to, not ever, preferably, but at the very least not for a few years– gods, she had been hoping that Wato stuck around with her eccentric ass for a few years– but she will talk about  _ it _ if she has to. And she has to. There’s no other way to get the rest of the information she needs to navigate Wato through the minefield she’s stranded herself in. 

Sherlock spends three days carefully dancing around the topic. She’ll bring it up over a cup of tea that’s becoming a silent vigil of a ritual before Wato resigns herself to bed each night. She’ll mention it when they’re taking their respective outpatient medications each morning. She’ll happen to comment on it when they’re watching some shit TV show that Sherlock is doing her absolute best to enjoy. Nothing too upfront. Nothing intrusive. Just enough to wet her toes in the idea, so it doesn’t come as an entire shock when Sherlock turns to Wato, under the elaborate pretext of sharing some chocolate with her (she has stockpiled more than anyone should ideally consume in preparation for this evening), while Wato finishes a book and Sherlock pretends to be engaged in mixing some more cucumber toner (they’re both going to need it, after all), and says, “Wato, what were your parents like?”

Wato still gets an expression in the curve of her lips like half of Sherlock’s face has been blown off. “What?” she whispers. It’s clarification: does Sherlock really want to ask that? Sherlock does, so she holds her ground and snuggles as deep as she can get into her blanket and her chair without inconveniencing her cast-arm. Wato fumbles, “Um, I guess… I guess they were pretty normal.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little short and a little late but here is sherlock being a worried girlfriend for 1856 words straight <33333
> 
> as always,   
> check me out on Tumblr [ tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ]  
> and  
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy! :DDDD


	5. Chapter 5

_ Wato _

Tachibana Wato’s dad owns a hospital. He goes in early each morning. He checks on some of the patients personally, the ones he knows. He eats his homemade lunch with the doctors and the nurses. He tells them all about his wife’s book club meetings at the house, his younger son’s renown as a middle-school chess player, his older daughter’s promise in studying to be a doctor and step right into his shoes when her time came. He runs a tight ship, but a fair one. He pays his workers well. He makes life-saving decisions and he sometimes waives fees for families who can’t pay. He works late. He double-checks on those patients whom he knows. He drives home. He knows exactly how you beat your child so it doesn’t break the skin or scar. He is a doctor, after all! 

Tachibana Wato’s mother is a homemaker. She wakes up early to make breakfast and pack lunches. She sees them off with a high-pitched “come home soon.” She keeps the house clean. She hosts book club on Tuesday afternoons while the kids are at school. She reads the other days of the week, and on the weekend. She screeches maniacally at the unfairness of her life for at least two hours each day, if she doesn’t have time while the kids are at school, she’ll just shoo them to their rooms for a while. She makes snacks for them to eat. She helps them with homework, if they ask politely. She prepares dinner when her husband calls her to say he’s on the way home. She panics until one of the kids sees her. She smiles, because she must do so, when her husband beats her children until they whimper. She is a mother, after all!

Tachibana Wato’s brother goes to school. He rides the train three stops to his school. He sits alone before class starts. He learns all sorts of things on his phone under the desk– where to buy a gun, how to sever an artery, what do beheadings look like, what’s the easiest way to rape a girl, which drugs are easiest to get. He sits alone at lunch. He thinks about ways to die, and ways to kill, until classes get out. He does not want to go home. He goes to chess club and he wins every game. He rides the train three stops home. He listens to his mother scream and cry until his sister deals with it. He stares at the wall or tortures bugs until it’s time to do his homework because he is not allowed to do anything else. He sometimes helps his dad beat his sister because he will be beaten if he doesn’t. He is a young boy, after all!

Tachibana Wato has a very normal family! After all, it’s the only family she knows.

Wato never had many friends, her father discouraged it. He said all Wato needed to do, in her whole life, was study and become a doctor at least half as good as him. It was all being handed to her, you see. Even someone as dumb as her, as incompetent as her, as inept as her, as clumsy as her, as left-footed as her, as weird as her, as awful as her– even someone like her could do it, if they were trying. Aren’t you even trying, Wato? Stupid girl. The oldest and she’s only placed thirteenth in her class. Aren’t you doing anything, Wato? So clumsy. She tripped again, that’s all. Aren’t you grateful, Wato? Gross. There’s a reason nobody wants to hang out with you– that girl, that boy, that “friend” is only pitying you. Stay away from them or you’ll regret it. They’ll regret it. All Wato needed to do was study and become some kind of doctor so her father’s reputation would not be tarnished. Then the company would be handed to her on a silver platter– such a kind father– and she would be well off enough, and she would of course– when she found a husband, a husband her father approved of– she would stay close to Wato’s family and maybe even live with them and they would all be together forever– so don’t think about telling anyone– and Wato would have two kids of her own and they would all live together in Wato’s father’s house– truly, a provider– and Wato and her father would run the company and everything would be wonderful. They’re a family, after all!

So, it’s no wonder that, after getting her medical degree on her father’s dime, Wato had no clue what to do with herself. It was all laid out so clearly for her, such a shame! At the end of the semester, in six days, she would be kicked out of the dorms and she would have to go home take over the company marry a man have two kids live with her father. Finals can be a stressful time!

The student volunteer group advertised with posters in bright red and yellow, all over school, “Volunteer your medical skills in Syria! Save lives! Help those in need! Further your experience!” Wato did not speak to the student volunteer group at any point before, but she signed her name and packed one suitcase and left everything else because she hated the feeling of clothes on her skin and skin on her muscles and muscles on her bones and bones constricting the life out of her soul. She went to Syria to save lives, mostly her own. She is a doctor, after all!

Syria was a dangerous place, gunshots woke up the roosters that were to be slaughtered for dinner, and the volunteer doctors were up before the gunshots. 

Tachibana Wato volunteers as a doctor. She wakes up before anyone else to check which of last night’s new patients made it to morning. She calls the burial team for those that didn’t and she changes bedpans and IV lines and bandages for those that did. She eats a late breakfast with the other doctors and nurses and volunteers and patients. She stays on the outside of the range of bullets while she looks for the injured from any nationality or political alignment. She carries those she can manage on her own back to the clinic, and gets help to transport those she can’t. She treats new wounds and ailments with her limited supplies. She changes more bandages, IV lines, and bedpans. She comforts family members as their loved ones recover, fade out, are treated, are buried, or even just while they listen to the gunshots and bombings drown out the hum of desert insects. She eats a late dinner with the other patients, volunteers, nurses, and doctors. She reads a letter from Dr. Mizuno, and she sends the glossy images she is so good at pretending in return. She is a doctor, after all!

But then someone thinks they don’t care if some of the people in the clinic are on their side, and they drop a steady rain of bombs right onto the low roof. Shrapnel and stone and two shards of bone from a volunteer nurse’s finger slide into Wato’s back the way they might have slid through water. Wato does not think about how bad it hurts– she has a lot of practice just think about something else Wato you stupid clumsy girl you fell again and made your mom cry what is wrong with you Wato think about something else– no. The first thing she does is turn around and see that anyone behind her is dead and there is nothing to change that. She turns and methodically checks every new ailment, every new issue. She works around the ringing in her ears and the give of her knees and the inability to use one arm. She can’t do much– Wato you incorrigible girl you incompetent girl you idiot– but she does what she can, she thinks. Lots of people die that day and she is almost one of them several times. The bomb should have done her in first. The concussion or the blood loss next. The exhaustion could have done it. The tumble she took when she really couldn’t stand up anymore. The haphazard surgery with no anesthetic to spare. The infection. Had there been any place to keep her, they would have kept her, but the clinic had been blown to smithereens and she isn’t deathly infected after a few days so they book her a plane ticket to– where had she been from? Japan? They book her a plane ticket to Tokyo and they call that man she’s always sending letters to so he can pick her up and arrange a hotel for her– he’s a doctor, after all– and they ship her off with some of their precious remaining pain reliever for the plane ride. 

And then Dr. Mizuno’s wife explodes his stomach and Wato blows out two stitches trying to put pressure on a wound that will never close and she just. Sits at the police station with a wife that is grieving less than she is. Just waits and only finds it in her to do anything when a woman walks right up to her and sniffs her hair and tells her she smells of gunpowder and Wato’s stomach flips three times like a dog for a treat. Wato’s never really  _ wanted _ or  _ liked _ something before. She hadn’t known how. She had known how to  _ avoid _ and how to  _ fear _ , because that was all she had needed– that, and her husband and her two kids and her father and her hospital. But Sherlock, self-named  _ Sherlock, _ was gorgeous and intelligent and awkward and eccentric and made Wato feel human. She’d threaten a drug dealer in his own place of business, but cover her ears like a child because the music was too loud. Wato almost forgets the two ruptured stitches, but she remembers to go to the hospital at some point between it all– in the middle of the night when she should have been sleeping because it was either the nightmares in her bed or the ones that come with the white walls and complacent smiles and smells of anesthetic and fresh-laundered scrubs.

Then her hotel burns down– her hotel burns down!– and she is realizing she has to go back home now– to her father and her husband-to-be-found and her kids-to-be-had and her hospital-to-be-inherited– and she feels every human sensation she’s felt in the breathless few days she got drop out from under her toes and she feels that nurse’s bones slide under her scapula and she feels her father’s heel connect with her temple and she asks Sherlock her real name– she’s got to know, now, now that she’s leaving. But someone does something, Wato doesn’t know what, she was too focused on Sherlock, and now Wato and Sherlock are going to live together and Wato doesn’t have to go home; and yes Wato is offended when she doesn’t eat breakfast but she’ll take weird coffee over her father any day. Sherlock is a friend, after all!

* * *

The silence left from Wato’s story is jarring, angular, painful. It feels like the abstraction of the anger that burns from the inside– or maybe Sherlock is projecting. It looks like nothing, Wato’s face is impassive, as if she were recounting the injuries of a nearby corpse, or relaying the statistical data on how long a wound would take to heal. It doesn’t look personal. The silence smells like hospital disinfectant and tastes like gunpowder and rubble. But it sounds like nothing. It’s silent. Sherlock has no clue what to say. Yes, puzzle pieces have fallen into place staggeringly, but at the cost of Wato’s eyes dimming any aspect of warmth away. Sherlock supposes she has to– has to hide that part of herself, isolate it, to protect it. But it hurts. It hurts thinking Wato had to taste the coppery sting of blood on her own, had to smell the death in a warzone and think “yes, this is safer.” So Sherlock abandons her chair and squeezes herself next to Wato, and leans her head on her shoulder, and absolutely invades her personal space until it’s so uncomfortably close that there is  _ no  _ way Wato could feel alone. 

It works well enough, warmth comes too suddenly back to Wato’s eyes and forces its way through the walls in rivulets of water that track down her cheeks. Wato tries to hide it. She scrubs furiously at her tears with a sleeve of her sweater and smiles too widely and asks “Now you, what were your parents like?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey yall sorry im a day late i had a migraine for 2 days straight and then the moment i recovered from that one of the kittens I'm fostering crawled into my lap and just died (heart failure from a congenital defect), and then the other kitten I'm fostering suddenly couldn't use three of his legs (also heart failure from a congenital defect jfc) so it's been a rough week. yesterday i took a shower for the first time in five days :D i have been subsisting on three boxes of discount charleston chews that i got at the rite aid on sale while i was picking up baby aspirin for the kitten to thin his blood clot (arterial thromboembolism is a blood clot that stops bloodflow to the back two legs-- according to the three vet textbooks and many vet websites I've read in the past three days). baby Dre (that is the kittens name, his brother was Eminem and his mom is Nikki) is doing much better now. can use both front paws, his tail, and is starting to regain sensation in his back legs. how tf it work that i can save a 6 week old kitten from heart failure and blood clots but i can't keep a basil plant alive????
> 
> anyway sorry that was a lot   
> but i hope u enjoy the chapter!!! yall gon scream but i really enjoyed the narrative voice for this one, i had a great time writing it :) (wtf is wrong w me XD)  
> tune in next Wednesday to see Sherlock's childhood >:D
> 
> as always,   
> check me out on Tumblr [ tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ]  
> and  
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!! <33333


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey so i know there's one of you reading that doesn't actually watch "Miss Sherlock," so i wanna clarify that "Sarah" is Sherlock's birth name in the show, which she changed after some "big event" or some in her life.

_ Sarah _

Sarah’s parents are never home, and she likes it that way (a teenage girl is always excited to have a big house to themselves). When they’re gone, she can do any experiment she likes and clean it up when she feels like it. When they’re gone, she can spend hours researching anything she wants to. When they’re gone, she can hear herself think. When they’re gone, she is alone in the best sense of the word and when they are gone she does not have to worry about them.

Their nagging.

Their prodding.

Their dragging tirades.

Their screaming.

Sarah has a mother and a father. They both frequently work in Europe, so Sarah stays alone in their large and stately house in Japan. When she was little, Kento had lived at home, but he, like a fledgling bird, had been thrust from the nest to “make something of himself, goddammit” at twenty, and she rarely saw him anymore. Sarah suspects Kento isn’t allowed in the house anymore, but she’ll never get such an intelligible statement from her parents. They speak in riddles and metaphors and intentions and body language and tone and threat and implications. They’re politicians, you see, an international business lawyer and a diplomat, working closely together to ensure the downfall of some Middle Eastern democracy or another. Sarah suspects they don’t love each other more than they would love a blade of grass; that is, she isn’t sure how much love they’re physically capable of. Sarah has, from a young age, as young as she could read her own books, been a woman of science and logic and straightforward procedure. This, of course, is recondite to her parents, who just wish she had taken after her older brother and pursued business or law or foreign affairs or political science or even  _ English _ . That way they wouldn’t have to waste time with a damaged child.

Kento, of course, when she was young and before she had been alone, had explained to her very carefully that the diagnosis  _ autism _ did not mean she was  _ broken _ only that her brain categorized things using a different system, and might prioritize some things over others in a way their parents would not seek to understand. He had said not to worry about it very much because everyone was pretty much different anyway. Kento had always been the one to remember the things Sarah would forget: food, laundry, keeping important documents off of the floor, shoes, manners. Sarah didn’t ever think those things were important, and so when Kento was shoved from the house like a pathogen, Sarah had just continued doing things her own way; sans breakfast, wearing the cleanest of her dirty clothes, spreading documents in spiderweb patterns on the dining room floor, kicking her shoes off in the living room and only half the time remembering to put them on again to go outside. She did the things she liked to do: she kept very organized notes for all her experiments, she went to school because she enjoyed the atmosphere of learning (even if she didn’t enjoy the petty things her classmates were so concerned with like short skirts and new games and cell phones), she sometimes found the kids that hung out behind the gym doing drugs and she would sit with them. Sarah never told anyone anything because she knew that was something people did not like. Sarah kept quiet and did her work when asked and did a lot more than anyone asked her to when they weren’t looking. Sarah avoided attention and avoided noise and avoided people in general. Nothing was really worth it other than her experiments. 

Except when her parents came home. 

The house became very different when her parents came home. Everyone talking all the time and never to her but for some reason Sarah always had to stand right there and listen. She wasn’t allowed to leave. She wasn’t allowed to speak. She didn’t understand why she was there at all.

_ Sarah, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have a normal daughter a pretty daughter why does our daughter act like a freak don’t walk off while I’m talking to you do something with your hair it’s too long to leave it down like that take your shoes off before you come inside goddammit why don’t you hang out with that Itsuki girl she seems nice I think she’d be a good influence on you stop doing those gross experiments why don’t you go shopping with your friends you’ll never find a rich husband if you stay bony like that boys don’t like girls who are smarter than them don’t act like that in front of boys or girls you’re embarrassing your poor parents don’t you know how much we sacrificed for you so ungrateful don’t you turn your back on me young lady we kicked Kento out too soon he was the smarter child the better child so polite well until he started getting all those ideas about Sarah’s “autism” if it wasn’t for you Sarah he might not have to work so hard to make rent every month he always asks after you but we think it’s better if you two don’t speak don’t slouch like that stop fidgeting why are you so embarrassing Sarah Sarah stop doing that Sarah go away Sarah don’t ignore me Sarah you’re so troublesome Sarah Sarah _

Then, they’d be boarding a flight back to Europe, and Sarah would be very confused when they hugged her like they meant it at the front door next to their luggage. She would ask them if they really were going to kick her out too and make her pay her own rent, like Kento, and they would laugh like she was the stupidest child in the world and coo “Oh, Sarah, we would  _ never _ , you know that, Sarah!” Except Sarah  _ didn’t _ know that. Even after they said it she didn’t know that. 

One time, two weeks before Sarah graduated high school, her parents came home. To celebrate, they’d said, and they made a big show of how important their phone calls were by taking them in the middle of the living room in the middle of conversations and explaining to their coworkers or contacts that they just  _ couldn’t possibly _ talk right now because they’re at home with  _ their youngest, yes, Sarah, the troublesome one, well, she’s graduating high school, finally, but we’ll be back on a plane in no time, yea, sure, I’ll call you back Henry, bye bye now.  _

“We’re putting all our work on hold for you, Sarah, you could at least smile– not like that, Sarah, smile normally.”

Sarah didn’t understand. She had smiled. What had been wrong with her smile? How should she smile differently? Was her smile bad? Yes, it must be. She must just be bad, rotten, from a broken mold cast by her older brother, who was ruined now because of her. 

“Honey, did I tell you about what Kento told me?” 

Sarah stayed very still. If she stayed very still, her parents would forget she was there long enough to say what they had heard of Kento, and she could know how he was doing. If they noticed her, she knew from many observations that they would immediately hush up and whisper about discussing it later. 

“What did Kento tell you?”

“He told me that, since he moved out–”

“But you kicked Kento out,” Sarah corrected. She shouldn’t have. She knew she shouldn’t have, but they had spent so much time meticulously explaining about how Sarah had been the reason they’d had to put Kento out on the streets for college, about how Sarah had ruined Kento, their perfect son. 

They had rolled their eyes and smiled at Sarah like she was six and silly. “What are you saying, Sarah? We never would have done that– we’re not horrible parents. Why would you say something like that? Are you angry with us? Have we done something to upset little Sarah?”

For thirty minutes they badgered her, and two days later they still told Sarah that if they hadn’t had to throw Kento out because of her–  _ of course it was your fault Sarah don’t look at me like that you’ve known it all along it’s not our fault you’re like this no we never said that don’t be absurd _ . 

She didn’t get it, and she was so tired of not getting it and feeling like facts were grains of sand to slip through her fingers that she clutched all her long, pretty hair in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other and she made a nice ponytail that she sold to a wig-making company for around 5000 yen the next day before they sighed and asked her  _ what did you do to your pretty hair you look like a boy now it’s not cute Sarah at least if you were cute we wouldn’t have to worry so much Sarah why can’t you be normal Sarah Sarah what’s wrong with you don’t walk away when I’m talking to you jesus fucking christ why is our child such an ungrateful embarrassment _

So Sarah walked out the back door and she kept walking until she got to the roof of her school and she took off her shoes at the door for once even though she was going outside but there was a boy already there and she could have just waited but she was impatient so she called out to him and told him to step down from there and let her jump first and he said no and she told him that if he wouldn’t let her go first then he was a hypocrite and he said that’s not fair I got here first and she said fine then neither of us can and she hadn’t meant to say that because where else was she supposed to go but her and the boy talked for so long that it got dark and he said he wanted to go to art school and Sarah said then do it and he said that other kids made fun of him because he was overweight and Sarah said why would he even care about that and he said he feels alone and she said she’d sit with him at lunch and she sat with Mickey for the rest of the two weeks of school and she lived under a bridge with one of the kids who did drugs behind the gym and she got high enough that it didn’t bother her that her parents never came looking and Kento didn’t either because he probably didn’t know she was gone. 

She lived under that bridge for a year and got high whenever she could. 

After about a year, she was stumbling around looking for food, and an old lady was clearly lost, so Sarah gave her directions. The old lady insisted on feeding her dinner, even though Sarah had done her best to be rude to her. It wasn’t until they got into the apartment that Sarah saw the broken picture frame, the disorganized envelopes, the notes posted on the fridge, and put it all together and blurted out “She’s stealing from you.”

The old lady had stared, and stared, and stared. “Who, dear?” 

It took Sarah a minute to answer. This old lady had pulled a drug addict off the street, taken her into her home, fed her, and was now trusting the words coming out of her mouth. Who does that? 

Apparently, Hatano Kimie, who had a tenant who was robbing her blind every time Hatano left the house, and infringing on Hatano’s kindness by deferring her rent  _ just one more month, Kimie, I swear _ . That was the first time Sarah helped Hatano. 

Hatano asked Sarah if she wanted to stay in the now-empty room. Sarah said no, she can’t. When she got clean, Sarah promised, then she might, if the room was still available to her. 

Then there was the time with that man who tried to take advantage of Hatano. Sarah helped her then, and Hatano told her the room was still open and Sarah said no, she can’t. She doesn’t have any money anyway, and she never went to college so she can’t get a good job. 

Then there was the time when that company tried to rip her off. Sarah helped her then, and Hatano told her the room was still open, and Sarah said no, she can’t. She’d just be in the way.

Then there was the time where someone stole Hatano’s prized sapphire and opal necklace, an antique from her mother’s grandmother. Police detective Reimon Gentaro hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of the case, but Hatano brought in Sarah, high off her ass with whatever was popular then and dressed like a bum, and Sarah helped her in an afternoon. Hatano told Sarah, again, that the room was still available and Sarah said no, she can’t– but before she even got the full sentence out of her mouth Reimon was giving her directions to a rehab facility nearby. He said he could give her a consulting job if she could get clean, and he told her what that job might entail.

Sarah got clean in eight months and four days. 

She insisted everyone call her Sherlock now. She didn’t like her name. She could always hear it on her parents’ lips.

She’d found Kento with a quick google search in the rehab’s little computer center, and she’d started to send him letters, and he started visiting her before the second one arrived at his penthouse apartment. He only ever had twenty minutes, but he always came, every day. 

When she got out, her first instinct was to flinch when Hatano welcomed her home and Reimon welcomed her to her new job and Kento picked up every time she called him. She adjusted over time though.

She’d been living with Hatano and working with Reimon for a year, two months, and six days when a guilty widow had trailed in with a traumatized warzone medic on her heels, and Sherlock had felt her heart leap into her head in ways that made her a kind of dizzy she hadn’t felt in a year, two months, and seven days.

* * *

So, here they are. Exposed. Like the artery that had been laid on the pavement or the heart that had been shown the metal table. It’s the first step in a direction they hope is right. It’s scary. They’re both trembling a little, small tremors like whispered sound waves passing between them. It’s not comfortable. They won’t talk about it, not tonight, not after being scraped so raw. Even Sherlock’s cashmere-soft blanket feels like fine-grain sandpaper. 

Still, they’ve both fallen asleep wrapped around each other on the couch under Sherlock’s blanket watching Wato’s favorite TV show. 

They talk about it the next day. They both stay in and Sherlock makes breakfast– because she can understand that humans need food, and Wato is human (even if she’s not ready to say she is human herself). They ignore texts from Reimon and Mrs. Hatano and everyone else and they sit next to each other and they talk about how bad it hurt for so many years. Last night was the facts of the case, the dates and events, the mind of the matter. Today is how it all felt and how scared they were, their hearts. 

They make two promises. 

The first: it will never be like that again.

The second: they will be there for each other always– and if people want to call that love, then let them. 

They don’t swear by them, they just say them, offhand, after Wato suckers Sherlock into making chocolate chip cookies, but they mean it. They dedicate a part of their souls to it, without really meaning to. That’s what people call love.

But they don’t call it love today. 

They call it love two weeks and three days later when they’ve been chasing a kidnapper down residential streets behind trash cans and past convenience stores and they’re screaming laughing because not only did the kid escape on his own and run to the police without so much as panicking but the woman who had held him captive is now on the run wearing her work uniform as a cafe mascot and she’s as clumsy as a bull in a china shop and they catch her and they’re still laughing when they stumble through the door to their home drunk on adrenaline and fall into each other’s arms and share their first kiss like a bite of a chocolate-covered strawberry in the early fall or ice cream in the late spring and they’ve never felt this alive or this happy in their whole entire lives. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey yall. i feel like this fic was so short, but i love yall and i hope yall enjoyed :D  
> also, thank u for all the comments and reading nd kudos, genuinely those make my day, and i appreciate every one of u for walking this little trail w me and the Gals <3 
> 
> wanna see what's up next for my Wednesday fics and life in general? [ tumblr.com/blog/bmgh-writing ]
> 
> and, as always,  
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!! :DDDDD


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